Egregius: Sorry, I must have missed that you were working on those, too. My bad. I'd be glad to exchange thoughts and compare notes.
If you are having problems with the desigcreation file, I am sure that I can be of help. I have some modding experience with that (done two races for standard SE IV so far, as well as a couple for the Devnull Mod Gold). If you have any question, just post them or drop me an email (snickelsen@web.de). There is also a design creation "cheatsheet" made by Atraikius that is of great help to figure out that AI file. You can find that in the mod section somewhere. Btw, thanks Atraikius
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edit:
Found it. Look for a post by Atraikius on June 7th 2001 that has a "Design Creation Cheat Sheet" attached.
As far as life support and so on, you can make the hull needing no life support, if you want. I don't know what the connective tissue is supposed to do, but you can add that as an extra component. For all the other components/abilities (sensors, ECM, cloak, whatever) needed for a monster, you can just add them to the hull (body) of the monster and not worry about the design minister choosing the wrong parts. Weapons can be added quite easily, just give your new monster weapons their own weapon numbers and use those for the primary and secondary weapons. You can also give some monster part bogus abilities like "star - unstable", "ancient ruins", or "ancient ruins unique" and use those abilities to add specific parts to a monster.
Thanks for tip about the pics. I was planning on using not a complete shipset, but different pics for the various monsters. The Cephalopeia will be good for some monsters, but I don't want them to be "squids only". I want Dragons, Amoeba, Jellyfish, sentient gas clouds, and whatnot as well. You know, the whole suite of classic space monsters.
About harvesting asteroids: sorry, but AFAIK the AI cannot do remote mining. But this is not a problem. The space monsters will not need resources much anyway. If give them a large enough maintenance reduction, the will actually not pay maintenance, but produce resources with their ships (negative maintenance = resource production). So the more monsters are out there, the more resources will be gained.
To all: If you have any ideas for a specific space monster that you would like to see (like a Dragon that spits a hundred fireballs per turn), just post here.
Rollo
[ 25 January 2002: Message edited by: Rollo ]